Vice President Kamala Harris’s crushing loss on Election Day was due in part to her inability to win over male voters, many of whom tune in to the Joe Rogan Experience.
While her victorious rival President-elect Donald Trump appeared on the popular Spotify podcast, Harris did not, though Rogan’s audience of millions represented a significant voting bloc she needed to win over ahead of the election.
Here’s everything you need to know about the high-profile interview the vice president never showed up to.
The marijuana rule
Rogan had his heart set on interviewing Harris, and his team negotiated for weeks with the Harris campaign in an effort to agree to terms that both camps could sign off on.
Their discussions surrounded, in part, “requirements on things that she [Harris] didn’t want to talk about,” per the podcast host’s remarks during one of his latest episodes with comedian Adrienne Iapalucci. One of those topics was marijuana legalization, an issue the vice president took flak about on the campaign trail.
“She didn’t want to talk about marijuana legalization, which I thought was hilarious,” Rogan said.
Harris has long supported cannabis legalization, including during her campaign against Trump, but was criticized for prosecuting people using the drug during her time as a San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general. Under Harris’s tenure, there were 1,956 convictions for misdemeanor and felony marijuana offenses, per an analysis from the Bay Area News Group.
Rogan said he eventually extended an “open invitation” to the Harris campaign, saying he didn’t care what they talked about or couldn’t discuss, as long as the vice president consented to do the interview.
“I would love to talk to her about all kinds of s***. I literally said, because there were a few restrictions of things they didn’t want to talk about, but I said, ‘I don’t give a f***; get her in here,’” he said during a podcast episode last week.
Progressive staffers
Harris faced internal opposition from some members of her staff for considering sitting down with Rogan, according to senior Harris campaign adviser Jennifer Palmieri.
The vice president’s own team members were concerned about reactions to doing the interview from within the Democratic Party according to Palmieri’s comments to the Financial Times on Wednesday.
“There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it and how there would be a backlash,” she said.
However, a report from the Washington Post pushed back against suggestions that the concerns were the primary reason Harris declined to do the interview.
“Big issue was timing,” Michael Scherer said in a post on X.
Scheduling conflicts
Timing the interview did appear to be a major reason the podcast appearance fell through.
Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams noted concerns about “scheduling” conflicts had prevented the episode from being recorded during the last week of October.
Rogan confirmed timing conflicts with the Harris campaign were throwing a wrench in the podcast plans, saying that the vice president was unwilling to make the trip to his recording studio in Austin, Texas. He also said that Harris wanted to limit the sitdown to one hour, even though most Rogan podcast episodes run more than three hours long.
On Oct. 29, Rogan was still trying to keep his dreams of having Harris on his show, saying in a post to X, “For the record the Harris campaign has not passed on doing the podcast.”
“They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin,” he said.
Post-election reaction
Trump’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience was staggeringly popular, garnering more than 50 million views on YouTube alone. Critics, even allies in her own party, have suggested Harris missed a big opportunity by making her own appearance on the podcast.
“It’s all about having conversations and having an exchange of ideas,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) said during a recent interview with Semafor. “I think it’s important for all of us, especially for elected leaders, to challenge your own views and to expose yourself [to others].”
Fetterman continued to criticize the Democratic Party for not doing enough to reach male voters, who tune in in large numbers to Rogan’s podcast.
“We have a challenge. We have our own kind of ‘childless cat ladies’ situation: ‘Bros.’ People refer to these young guys as bros, and clearly that’s not a positive term,” Fetterman said. “They’re described as dopes or gullible or brutes. That violates the basic, basic rule of politics. Don’t subtract, do addition. I think that was part of the new coalition that really delivered a pretty crushing victory for Trump.”
